The meanings attributed by the pregnant women to the application Gestação

Raimunda Magalhães da Silva

Christina César Praça Brasil

José Eurico de Vasconcelos Filho

Francisca Francisete de Sousa Nunes Queiroz

Patrícia Moreira Costa Collares

Keywords:
Gestation; mHealth; Health promotion.

Abstract

Gestation requires special care, because at this stage the woman has experiences resulting from physiological and psychosocial modifications (Collares, 2014). Information on gestation is more easily acquired by electronic means, as these technologies are easily accessible and convenient for obtaining information (Fleming, Vandermause, & Shaw, 2014). This study aims to verify the meanings attributed to the GestAção application by pregnant women, from the usage experience.

This is an applied methodological study, with a qualitative approach. Women who were in the first or second gestational trimester, who had smartphones with Android technology, and had access to the Internet in their daily lives (via Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, others) participated in the research. Data were collected from June to September 2017. Seventeen pregnant women were identified to compose the sample, with which the interview was applied to verify the socioeconomic profile, the health conditions, the affinity level of the future using technology tools and the type of mobile phones they had (brand, model and technology type - Android or iOS). The research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the University of Fortaleza under opinion nº 1,666,807. In the consolidation of the sociodemographic profile 17 pregnant women presented ages ranging from 13 to 35 years, with an average of 22 years; being 47.06% under the age of 18 years. Among the participants, 35.29% are married or living in a stable union, while 64.71% are single. Among the most frequent levels of education were incomplete primary education (23.51%), incomplete secondary education (29.41%) and complete secondary education (29.41%). With respect to family income, 52.94% is in the range of up to one minimum wage. As far as professional life is concerned, 70.59% do not work. Regarding the credibility attributed to the information offered by the application, the users expressed positively in the interviews, denoting a relevant role of the tool in the context of health promotion, as shown in the following reports :

Knowledge ... It was very important to me, because before that [of using the GestAção], I had installed another application. But that application did not teach these things that GestAção teaches. Now that I've installed, I've learned many things! (G2).

[...] as it is my fourth pregnancy, and all of them were different from each other. In my first pregnancy, I felt nothing, neither in my second nor in my third .... But in this one I am feeling everything .... When I felt something different that I did not know what it was, I accessed the application and he would let me know exactly what it was. It was very good! I took out all my doubts through the application. (G 12)

The application is an additional resource for prenatal care, with potential to help pregnant women interested in qualifying their knowledge and in impacting on the process of empowering pregnant women.